Chapter 7: Teaching Difficult Academic Material

“Especially with the hard subjects, it’s difficult to figure out what they’re trying to teach you if you don’t know it yet. For chemistry, they gave us a really difficult book to read; it used words that I didn’t have any idea of. It was a really good book, I could tell, but I didn’t have any incentive to read it. I couldn’t concentrate, because the assumptions were that you knew a lot already.” Page 125.

The teacher obviously overestimated his students’ knowledge of chemistry and even their vocabulary by giving them a difficult text book to read and try to comprehend. And probably, at first, the students tried to read it, understand it, and do the homework. But, then they gave up after a while when they realized the book was just too hard to understand. The teacher should have noticed that the homework wasn’t that good and students would come to class not understanding major concepts.

I had classes like that in high school, and they really stunk because I didn’t know what was going on, and my fellow classmates were in the same situation. Now that I look back on it, I wish that I had told the teacher, just so that maybe the next year, they could order new text books that were easier to understand. I also think that if I was the teacher and knew that the book was really difficult, I wouldn’t teach right out of the book, I would ‘dumb it down’ for them and give some easy examples out of the book to improve the students’ confidence. In this way, they would learn and they wouldn’t hate and dread the class.